Poor telecom facilities hamper e-commerce plans

JAKARTA (JP): Poor telecommunication infrastructure and low computer affordability have caused a slow adoption of the e- commerce in Indonesia, experts of information technology said here on Thursday.

Arvino Mudjiarto, country director of Lotus Consulting & Professional Services, said Indonesia's telecommunication facilities, the backbone of the multimedia services, were still too weak to accommodate the vast development of information technology.

"The accessibility and affordability of computers are very much limited that only people in big cities are ready for computers and internet systems," he said.

"Still, most of them do not really understand about computer functions and usages," he told participants of seminar and exhibition on telecoms and information technology, the Techno Pre-Eminence 1999, held until Dec. 11 by state-owned telecoms company Telkom.

According to Indra Utoyo of Telkom's Multimedia Division, there were about two million computer users in Indonesia, but only 250,000 people of them actually possessed and used their own devices at home.

Arvino said massive education in the use and benefit of computers in addition to the improvement in the development of information technology and more even distribution of computers at different areas were necessary if Indonesia did not want to be left behind completely in the technology race against neighboring countries.

Indonesia is considered by analysts as several years behind other countries in America, Europe and even Asia in developing the e-commerce. Indonesia has only started using the service in 1997, while the system itself was already famous and widely used in America since early 1990s.

The Reference Guide to E-commerce in South Asia classified Indonesia as a country with slow adaptation to e-commerce with usage growth around 16 percent and 18 percent in the recent year. Singapore is voted as the most adaptive country with usage growth reached over 28 percent.

One of the fundamental causes to the slow adaptation is the fact that the teledensity rate in Indonesia is still very low with only 3.6 percent of its over 200 million population have access to telephone lines, which are the basic requirement for computer and e-commerce use.

The other factor lied on the fact that there was only few e- commerce service providers operated in the country due to the high investment and complicated technology, Indra said.

"As far as I'm concerned, Telkom is the only e-commerce service provider in the country which offer the most comprehensive services from virtual mall development to billing arrangement," he said.

He said there were currently five e-commerce service providers catering for the business-to-business e-commerce and only three providers for the business-to-customer e-commerce.

Indra said more companies were currently involved in the business-to-customer e-commerce services, seeking for potential market on the internet.

He said no less than 500 sites were now available in the internet offering varieties of products and services to internet users.

"One of the biggest transactions made by our client users is booked recently by Agis electronic store, which recorded about Rp 90 million (US$12,857) in sales in two weeks period," he said. (cst)